


a new beginning

by Marvelouscity



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Padmé Amidala Lives, Padmé-Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 18:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9336254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marvelouscity/pseuds/Marvelouscity
Summary: Anakin’s nightmares are wrong. She doesn’t die.***In which Padmé escapes with Luke and Leia and starts over again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Noelle](http://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager) and [Melanie](http://jinglepie.tumblr.com) for looking this over and cheering me on.

Anakin’s nightmares are wrong. She doesn’t die.

Well, sort of.

They tell her that technically, she _did_ die for a moment, but they brought her back to life. No one can explain it – not her ability to live, but her brush with death. When they tell her that for a moment they thought she didn’t want to live, she is angry. She may have lost Anakin, but she still has her children. She can’t abandon them. She would never abandon them on purpose.

But that’s exactly what Obi-Wan and Senator Organa want her to do now. “Not a chance,” Padmé snaps at them. “I will not have my children lose two parents at once.”

“Padmé,” Bail says gently, but with a note of caution in his voice, “if you’re not careful, _you_ will lose both your _children_ at once. This is to protect them.”

She is shaking her head as he talks, refusing to believe him. “No,” she says, “no. I won’t lose my children. I won’t. And anyway, Anakin wouldn’t hurt them. They’re not in danger; he would want to protect them.”

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Padmé, Anakin hurt _you_. But Anakin isn’t Anakin anymore.” He looks down at the table, dully, not able to look her in the eye. “Anakin is dead. Darth Vader now lives in his place.”

Padmé stands up and begins to pace the small room aboard Bail’s ship. “I refuse to believe that. There has to be some good in him still. How can you just give up on him?” she says, turning toward Obi-Wan, growing louder with every word. “How can you say he’s dead without trying to bring him back?” He only shakes his head and continues staring into the table, as though suddenly answers will appear on its transparisteel surface. As though things will ever make sense again.

In the far corner of the room, one of her children starts to cry, and Padmé’s face falls. She walks over to the crib in which her twins are laying. It’s Leia. Padmé picks her up and holds the baby close to her chest, gently rocking her. She whispers to her daughter, “It’s okay, mother is here, it’s all right,” over and over until she finally quiets. Walking over to the viewport with Leia still in her arms, she looks out into hyperspace. Anakin, or what’s left of him, is out there, somewhere. His choice, she realizes, to be there, instead of with her, with their children. As much as Obi-Wan wants to pretend otherwise, to act as though Darth Vader and Anakin are two different people, Padmé knows the truth. Anakin has made his choice: to leave everything that’s good about the universe behind – to leave _her_ behind, and everything she has ever stood for – so he can have power. So he can be a Sith Lord.

She looks up to find Bail and Obi-Wan looking back at her. _Maybe_ , she thinks, _maybe they think this is the part where I give up. But it won’t be._ “They need their mother,” she whispers, careful not to disturb Leia again, “and I need them. They will be no safer away from me than they would be with me.”

“They need to be split up, Padmé,” Bail says, “for their own good. Anakin –” he hesitates at a look from Obi-Wan – “ _Vader_ will have less of a chance of finding them if they’re split up.”

“That makes no sense. Ani and I –” she pauses, finally starting to realize the full breadth of what she has lost, – “well. We thought we were only having one child. He won’t be looking for twins. They will be safer together. Besides, he thinks I’m dead. And safety aside, their lives will be better with me.” Padmé looks Bail in the eye. “They need their mother,” she repeats steadily.

“Padmé …” Bail hesitates. “My wife and I can’t have children, and we’ve talked about adopting a little girl. Perhaps we could –” He gestures to Leia in her arms.

“I appreciate it, Bail, really, but I won’t give them up. Either of them.” She gently sets Leia down in the crib again, next to Luke, who is still sleeping peacefully. “And there’s nothing you can do to change my mind.”

The skeptical looks both of them give her make her feel impossibly old. Her whole life, she has been too young – too young to be queen, too young to be Senator. Now she is 27, and a mother, and she feels old. She feels that she could take anything they – or anyone – threw at her.

But to her surprise, both men nod, accepting her choice. Good. Now to find somewhere to go. *

***

The three of them settle, after some lengthy debate, on taking both of the twins to Alderaan. Bail and Obi-Wan aren’t crazy about the idea, really, but Padmé insists. She hasn’t put all of this work into the Rebel Alliance just to give up now. Especially not now. If she has to go into hiding, she’ll do it on a planet where she can still be of some use. They argue, but in the end, they know that she’s right.

The first thing she does after they make the decision is shave her head. Padmé knows, after a long time spent with her handmaidens, that there is nothing truly unique about her looks. She has no distinctive features, no oddly shaped nose or plush lips – and no notable scars or birthmarks. She should count herself lucky that her form of beauty is so common; with a few modifications, she can pass for anyone. But it’s a thing to get used to, having her head shaved, trying not to stand out from the crowd. Some mornings she wakes up and automatically starts thinking about how she will style her hair, what ceremonies she has to attend, what her costume needs to say, only to remember where she is and, with a hand to her scalp, _who_  she is now. A nobody, unnoticeable, with the shaved head to match.

Despite the utility of a shaved scalp, sometimes she still desperately misses her hair.

The mountainous terrain of Alderaan is very similar to that of Naboo, which is comforting, in a way, but it also reminds Padmé of exactly what she has lost. She remembers, sometimes, all the fun she had as a child at Varykino, her family’s lake retreat on Naboo. All the time she spent with Anakin there, and their wedding. She tries to not think about it. _He made his choice_ , she reminds herself. _He’s the reason you can never go back there._ _It makes no sense to be sentimental._ She tries to put it out of her head. Some days she has more success with it than others.

She interviews for a job in the kitchens of the palace in Aldera, thinking about how it will be a perfect cover, and – to the surprise of both Obi-Wan and Bail – is hired. They forget, though, that she knows some things about going undercover, and being something you’re not. She’s picked up skills throughout the years that would suit her well in a variety of different jobs – cooking is simply one thing that she can do. But of course, her other, much more crucial job is to be the Rebellion’s spymaster. What better position to hide in plain sight? When her spies return to Aldera and head down to the kitchens to get something to eat, no one is the wiser that truthfully, they aren’t flirting with the short cook with the shaved head – they’re reporting to her. It’s a stretch for her memory, as it would be suspicious if she were to be seen writing anything down, but Padmé welcomes the challenge.

It turns out to not be so bad, being unnoticeable. In fact, it can be quite useful. Padmé quickly starts to grow her network of spies, masked as a lowly cook making friends with other palace workers. Once a week, she gets up early and cooks breakfast – though it’s not her usual shift – and brings it to Bail and Breha to report her findings. Over a hot cup of caf, they discuss her spies’ findings, and what should be done. It’s both painful and such a relief, to have this connection through them to her former life, to the world outside of Alderaan.

Padmé stays in contact with the other founding members of the Rebel Alliance, too. But it’s sometimes difficult to know who to trust. So she recruits even more spies, in even more places. Some of her spies are sent to spy on each other. She knows she can’t be too careful, so she recruits some other, more visible members of the rebellion to be her lieutenants, and sends people to report to them instead of her. The more complex she can make the hierarchy of spies, the better. It wouldn’t do for anyone on the Imperial side to find out that a woman from the palace kitchens was running the show. Better for them to think, if anything, that she’s only a small time spy herself.

She gathers information about the Emperor, and about Vader, and she passes it along – carefully, so carefully – to the other members of the rebellion along with advice on how to act on it. Padmé finds herself missing the politics and the schemes, and though she knows she’s probably out of touch by now and the information is useless, she still passes along the advice anyway. She’s much too smart to not know that it’s most likely ignored, but it makes her feel better to give it. After all, Padmé is nothing if not thorough.

***

The days start to go by quickly as she settles in. One day – almost a whole standard year after the twins are born – Padmé wakes up in the palace and starts her routine, like normal. She gets dressed, feeds Luke and Leia, delivers them to the palace nursery for the day, and heads down to the kitchens, mind wrapped up in some reports that had come in the day before. As she walks through the halls, the friends she has made smile at her as they pass. Agrati, who works in the laundry, one of Padmé’s spies. Ruby, the woman with the kind eyes that Padmé knows used to be a slave. Subra Fanthar, a clerk who works for Queen Breha. (Padmé had been afraid, at first, that Subra would recognize her, having met them once as Senator Amidala, but if Subra does recognize her, they haven’t said anything.) Upon reporting for work at the kitchens, she is given the task of chopping kebroots and topatoes for stew, and it’s soothing, somehow, using a knife to create instead of fight. Though it’s not her most important job, Padmé has found, since she’s been here, that she enjoys working in the kitchens.

She gets two reports, one of them early in the morning while she’s still working on the stew, one later in the afternoon when she takes her break and sits in the corner with a cup of tea. She makes sure to feed them well, even if that’s only a cover for why they’re here. She remembers how tired and hungry Anakin always was after returning from a Jedi mission. It seems that Imperial troops are on the move. She immediately arranges to have word of the movements sent to Admiral Ackbar, hoping he gets the information in time for it to be of any use.

That evening, as she picks the twins up from the palace nursery, still thinking about the Imperial troops’ movements, she realizes that it’s the first time she has thought about Anakin in a long time without feeling pain. She accepts, now, that he’s gone. Padmé has made a life for herself here, without him. It’s nothing like she would have envisioned life with her children would be like, and sometimes she chafes at the bit thinking about how she could be helping the galaxy so much more if she wasn’t confined to the palace kitchens, baking flatbread and listening to reports of things she will never see. Maybe when Luke and Leia grow older she will take more risks, try to participate more in the Rebellion. But for now, she turns to her desk in their small quarters, piled high with coded reports she has written down from memory, and gets back to work.

**Author's Note:**

> I know everyone's all about Rogue One right now, but I wrote this over a year ago and I wanted to finally post it somewhere.  
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Tumblr link is in my profile!


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